Augusta Civic Center gas conversion a tall order

AUGUSTA — Converting the Augusta Civic Center to heat with natural gas isn’t going to be quite as easy, nor nearly as cheap, as officials had thought.

A Summit Natural Gas of Maine gas line has already been run to the city-owned auditorium and convention center, and officials had planned to have the arena’s boilers converted and burning natural gas by now.

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Ralph St. Pierre, assistant city manager and finance director, said city officials believed switching the civic center’s multiple boilers from propane to natural gas would be a simple and relatively cheap process.

“We assumed we could just change the nozzles and convert it,” St. Pierre said. “That was a bad assumption. When we went to the manufacturer, they said our boilers cannot be converted from propane to natural gas.”

So instead of looking at a conversion cost of a few thousand dollars, the city could face a cost of between $150,000 to $250,000 to replace the propane boilers with new high-efficiency natural gas boilers to heat most of the building.

Nine boilers in the north wing of the civic center, which was built after the original building went up, can be converted from propane to natural gas at a cost of about $1,000 each, according to Dana Colwill, director of the civic center.

However, the nine boilers that heat the air and water at the civic center cannot be converted to natural gas.

St. Pierre said replacing the unconvertible boilers at the building with natural gas boilers will be included in a proposal for other energy efficiency upgrades to the civic center and other city property, which he’ll likely present to councilors next month.

The boilers that would be replaced are believed to be between 25 and 30 years old.

“At least the timing is good, it’s not like we just bought them three years ago,” Colwill said.

St. Pierre said the Civic Center’s energy costs, including heat and electricity, now average about $250,000 a year. The proposed energy efficiency upgrades are expected to reduce that cost by about $130,000 a year.

He said the city may be able to pay for the upgrades with revenue generated from the city’s Marketplace at Augusta tax increment financing district.

The district is a public financing tool to help economic development projects. State law allows municipalities to capture the value of property taxes from new development within the district. Municipalities sometimes give some or all of that revenue back to the developer of a private project in the form of a tax break as an incentive to locate there. Municipalities can also, as St. Pierre proposes, keep new property taxes generated within a district and spend them on certain allowed uses, one of which is economic development.

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